The Family as Church and Religious Community
Eliseo Mercado
We can say the same about family: “God is family and whoever abides in family abides in God and God abides in that person.” The theology of family roots itself here. Among other things, this means that a family is really a religious community, a church, the place where we participate in God’s own life.
God is a community, a trinity, a flow of giving and receiving between three persons. God is a family and when we participate in a family, we experience the very flow of God’s life. Family life then is church life.
This is easy enough to explain: What makes for church is gathering around the person of Christ and a common sharing of one Spirit – the spirit of charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, fidelity, gentleness, faith, and chastity.
As we all know, family and home, generally have more of an everyday face to them. Home and family life is the everyday, sometimes dram, business of staying together, eating together, praying together, sharing money and material things together, celebrating occasions together, being mutually accountable to each other, challenging and correcting each other, and carrying each other’s pathologies and weaknesses. Such are the functions of home and family. Such too is the function of church.
In the end, family life and church life are part of the same thing; in both we participate in God’s life. Among other things, this means that family life is not like church life, it is part of it. To participate healthily in a family is to be part of a church. The family is not secular while the church is divine, mundane while the church is holy, and the place of ordinary life while the church is the place of worship.
By abiding in family – by sitting down with each other around a kitchen table, by sharing the frustration of balancing a common cheque book, by celebrating each other’s joys and sorrows and everyday life, by offering each other consolation and correction, and by putting up with each other’s coughs, phobias, and sins – we experience church.
In both, family life and church, our lives break open beyond ourselves and God can enter.
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